


Heirs of the Blood

by fawatson



Category: Heart of Gold - Sharon Shinn
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:40:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25474009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/pseuds/fawatson
Summary: Family relationships 9 years after the gulden plague.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Juletide 2020





	Heirs of the Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



> **Request:** Kitrini - anything set after the story ends about her life with Nolan.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** I do not own these characters and make no profit by them.

Already, Nolan had developed the habit of looking in on the baby before he retired. Only one week old, and he had completely transformed the household. 

The baby was restless tonight. He had been slow to take his last feed, and Nolan had winded him on his shoulder, rubbing his back a long time before finally the little boy had burped. No, not burped: belched. Such a loud noise from such a tiny body; his entire chest had shaken with the effort of bringing up the air. And now he was restless, and had managed somehow to push the baby blanket off. 

As Nolan watched young Relt’s eyes opened. Nolan knew babies this tiny could not focus properly but he could swear the boy looked straight at him before he let out a protesting cry. He reached into the cot and picked up the baby, cradling him gently in his arms as he sat down in the rocking chair, before he lifted him up and rubbed his nose against the soft skin of the child – deep blue against gold – and drew a deep breath.

“You are the test of my hypocrisy,” he murmured to the unknowing little boy. He remembered Kitrini’s hesitance when she told him a week after they arrived at Munetrun that she had realised her last stolen afternoon with Jex had left her pregnant. 

“I could terminate it,” she had said. “Right now, it’s just a collection of cells – isn’t that what you said?”

“Clinically, yes,” Nolan remembered saying, “but it is also life, and the only child of the man whom, at one time, you wanted with all your heart to marry.” 

“It’s not fair on you to continue this pregnancy,” she said troubled. 

“And what is fair on this child?” Nolan asked. “A child of mixed parentage – neither indigo nor gulden. This baby will never be fully accepted by either race.” 

He remembered Kit had reminded him, “my father was”. 

But her father had looked pure indigo. This little mite – Nolan looked down on the baby in his arms, now peacefully asleep – this child had golden-red hair and pale gold skin and green eyes. The midwife had wanted to smother him at birth to hide the shame. 

Careful not to disturb the sleeping infant Nolan placed him back in his cot and went through to the adjoining bedroom where Kitrini, still exhausted from the difficult birth, was already asleep. 

He and Kitrini had married and he had said he would name the baby his. The child of his beloved wife: this gulden child who looked like Jex. 

Carefully Nolan slid into bed beside Kitrini and gently pulled her into his embrace, spooning her back. She loved her little boy unreservedly; he would too. 

>>>>><<<<<

Nolan sat on the patio sipping iced tea watching Relt play. The day was overcast and there was a damp chilly smell to the breeze; but it would probably be the last year they could be just a family together before the politics took over. The lad’s existence could not be kept secret from Chay forever. 

Nolan called out praise as Relt successfully climbed up the tree into the fort they had built together last summer. He was an eager bouncy boy who loved nothing more than to kick a ball or climb things; a lad who never played quietly – who was always noisy and often grubby. 

Nolan despaired at times. He did love Relt. When he was first born he was just the unwanted baby son of a man Nolan had never met, about whom everything he had heard left him cold with disapproval. But he was not a man who could take care of another person and not come to love him. Nolan remembered Pakt’s sons from his visits to that guldman’s well-ordered household: so boisterous and loud and physical. But they had been raised with gulden customs and strict discipline; and no matter how important he knew it would be for Relt to learn about gulden ways (they were part of his heritage) they were not practiced in this home. Nolan knew himself a calm man. He had been a thoughtful youth, one who had enjoyed his books. He had expected his influence to mean more. But Relt was always active – a restless baby, he had grown into a hyperactive toddler and now was a wilful boy who would far rather run and jump than open his school books. 

“Just like Jex,” Kitrini had shrugged when Nolan discussed it with her one evening two years before, troubled by the boy’s deliberate flouting of boundaries earlier in the day, all because - at five ( _just_ five!) he wanted to try climbing the trellis on the side of the house. 

“Are _all_ gulden boys like this?” Nolan questioned. “Or just Jex?” 

“I don’t really know,” she replied. “Jex was much indulged as Chay’s only son; but then so are many boys on Gold Mountain.” 

“It cannot just be upbringing,” Nolan pondered, “for Relt has not been raised in a gulden household, yet he seems naturally so much more active than indigo boys.” 

Typically, Nolan took his questions into his laboratory. There _was_ a difference, a biochemical difference, between his own blood and that of Relt’s. But was it just the difference between boy and man? He was still persona-non-grata at the Biolab but he corresponded freely with Pakt and sought samples. Relt was seven when Nolan isolated the enzyme and the gland which produced the higher levels of testosterone in gulden men. 

But there was something else: Nolan had not expected the deep well of emotion he’d felt when she saw his daughter born. Love Relt though he did, nothing matched the connection he felt to Lorimela. She was all any man could want in a daughter: elfin little Lorimela, with beautiful cobalt skin and glossy black curls, who loved her dolls tea set and all things pink, who was already learning how to sound out her letters. He did not believe in a man having favourites; he should love his children equally. 

But try though he may, Relt was not his son. Not that Nolan thought of him as Jex’s boy – more as Chay’s, a man Nolan had come to respect. And he was failing the boy. He could not instil a guldman’s customs and values; and he could not love him as he deserved. 

That night, as he climbed into bed beside Kitrini, after tucking the children into their beds, Nolan said, “I’ve come to a decision.” 

“Yes?” she answered absently, focused on the committee report she was reading. 

“I’ve invited Colt to join me in the lab; and I’m offering him the separate apartment on the third floor.” 

Kitrini put down her papers, surprised. “You invited him to stay?” 

“Relt needs a guldman to teach him the ways of Gold Mountain; and he needs the man who was his father's friend.”

>>>>><<<<<

Kitrini watched by the doorway, wryly amused by her guests. The ballroom was full of the great and good: representatives from high-caste families mingling with prominent gulden and well-respected albinos. There had been a time when this party could not have happened. The different races had met over conference tables in stuffy boardrooms hammering out treaties between nations and trade deals; but they had never socialised. There had been a time when she was – effectively - persona non-grata, tolerated out of respect for her grandmother. Now, however, she was a society hostess. No committee that made recommendations that affected gulden or indigo was complete without her. And twice a year she opened the doors to the townhouse her grandmother Lorimela had bequeathed her and hosted a ball, issuing invitations widely. Everyone who was anyone came. No one dared not to in these conciliatory times. Twelve years before the gulden were barely tolerated in the city, confined to its fringes in defined districts; ten years before Cerisa Daylen and Ariana Bayless had hatched their appalling plot and Nolan turned the ordered world as they knew it on its head. When the dust settled no one dared snub the gulden any more. They were allies now, allies against the inhumanity of terrorism and genocide.

Kitrini smiled again, shaking her head slightly: _uneasy_ allies. There had been a time when they would not have tolerated being in the same room; now they shared a buffet table, but they took their plates of rich food back to opposite sides of the hall. There were a few – a very few – racially mixed groups talking animatedly. For the most part, the Higher Hundred matrons stuck close to one another and the Guldmen talked only to their own kind. Was it race? Or was it that neither society was really terribly comfortable with men and women associating freely in public. It was past time for _her_ to circulate. There might be the odd latecomer, but most people who had planned to be here had arrived. Kitrini signalled to the band and crossed the floor to where Chay Zanlan stood talking to Brolt Barzhan: Gulden Political Leader and Gulden Business Leader undoubtedly using this informal social arena to settle some knotty problem between themselves. With a flourish she led Chay out to the middle of the floor to start the dance. 

>>>>><<<<<

“There she is,” Nolan whispered, pointing through the wrought iron filigree of the balcony overlooking the ballroom.

“Isn’t Mummy the _most_ beautiful,” whispered his little daughter. 

“In such company,” offered Nolan, in his characteristically measured way, “can any one person be called the ‘most’ anything?”

“Huh!” snorted Colt, “most powerful, perhaps! If one considers the resources Chay can call on with lifting one finger.” 

“Most gracious?” Nolan suggested, gesturing toward Sereva, who had followed Kitrini’s path and was dancing sedately with Pakt. 

“Most astute, would be my guess,” Colt retorted, nodding at Pakt’s blandly polite expression as he shepherded Sereva to the refreshments at the end of the dance, “to be in the right place at just the right time to take over the Biolab.” 

“No, the most _beautiful_ ,” insisted young Lorimela. “Isn’t she Relt.” She turned to the gulden boy standing behind her. 

“If you say so,” was the laconic reply. 

“And now, young lady,” reminded Nolan as he lifted his daughter, “it is long past your bedtime.” He turned to Colt, “will you stay with Relt while I see her settled?” 

“Relt and I will practice his presentation,” Colt said, and he waved the boy back into the room behind the balcony. “Now,” he instructed the lad, “three steps forward – no more, no less – and you bow from the waist, back straight….”

It was fully a half-hour before Nolan rejoined them to find Relt perched nervously on his chair, while Colt paced back and forth. 

“She demanded two stories before I was allowed to put out the light,” Nolan explained. 

“Allowed?” Colt mocked. “The top research biochemist in the entire world on gulden physiology and disease, and he is brought to heel by a five-year-old!” 

“Just wait until you have children,” chided Nolan, gently, pouring drinks from the pitcher of fruit juice on the sideboard and handing them round. 

Colt laughed and tossed down his drink in four big gulps but Relt took one sip and put his drink down. 

“Are you all right?” asked Nolan. 

Will he like me?” asked Relt, looking troubled. 

“Oh he’ll _like_ you, all right!” Colt replied. “What man could not _like_ the only son of his only son. But _approve_ of you? That’s another thing.” 

“Because of my mother,” Relt said in a small voice. 

“And your father,” Colt admitted. “He was my greatest friend but there is no denying Jex and his father were at loggerheads more often than not – and not just about his relationship with Kitrini Solvano Candachi.” 

“He will like you,” Nolan reassured, “and, in time, I expect he will come to love you for yourself, not just because you are the grandson he never expected, born of his most beloved son and the blueshi girl he adores more than his own daughters.” Nolan looked up to see Chay Zanlan standing in the doorway, staring straight at them. Kitrini stood a few steps behind, silent. 

“And now – as Colt taught you – make your bow to your grandfather.”


End file.
